CBSE Class 12 History

## Why the civilisation is called Harappan The first city of this civilisation to be found was Harappa, in what is now Punjab province in Pakistan, and archaeologists have a convention of naming a culture after the first site where its distinctive objects were identified. The civilisation is therefore called **Harappan**, and it is also called the **Indus civilisation** because many of its sites lie in the valley of the Indus and its tributaries. Its time is the Bronze Age of South Asia, and it is usually described as the first urban culture of the subcontinent. Harappa was known to the British long before anyone understood what it was. Alexander Cunningham, who began the Archaeological Survey of India's work in 1861 and later became its first Director-General, visited the site and was given a seal found there, which he recorded, but he was looking for the cities that Chinese Buddhist pilgrims had described from the first millennium CE, and he did not place the seal in an earlier period. In the nineteenth century the ruins were also damaged: bricks from the mounds at Harappa were carried off and used as ballast for railway lines laid in the region (Cunningham himself noted that enough had gone to lay about 100 miles of the line between Lahore and Multan), which destroyed a great deal of the town's structure before any proper excavation. ## The excavations of the 1920s Excavation began in earnest in the 1920s. Daya Ram Sahni began work at Harappa in 1921, and R. D. Banerji…